


A Slow and Vicious Hemorrhage

by justira



Category: Hannibal Lecter (Hopkins Movies), Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Hannibal Fusion, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Sherlock is Hannibal
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-04
Updated: 2016-11-04
Packaged: 2018-08-29 02:35:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8472226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justira/pseuds/justira
Summary: It's been a year since Irene Adler caught Sherlock Holmes. Now John Watson has been called in as medical consultant on a series of bizarre crimes that mimic aspects of Sherlock's murders, and the only one who knows who it might be this time is Sherlock Holmes himself.
---
A BBC Sherlock / Hannibal Lecter (books/movies) fusion.





	

The air gets heavier, down here, cooler and tinged with inescapable subterranean damp. John breathes it in, steadily; it doesn't particularly unnerve him. It reeks of institution and he's had practice enough with those. It's not calming, precisely, but it's familiar. It's all familiar. It's all fine.

It is.

His hand tightens on the two case files. It doesn't stop the tremor, but he rubs his thumb across the labels, the rough reality of them, already thoroughly ragged from the flicks and scrapes and polishing and various pointless attritions of dozens of fingers, despite the very recent dates stamped on both of them. Two dates, two names. Neither name belongs to Sherlock Holmes.

That file remains in the director's hands, accumulating lanolin stains as Chilton pushes unsteady fingers through his hair, shuffles the absurdly thick folder from hand to hand. The fingers and nails, in addition to the greasiness, present slight clubbing, John notes distantly. He has the feeling he'd rather do most things distantly, when it comes to Chilton.

"Extraordinary specimen," the director chitters. "The standard psych evaluations have been useless, of course. He plays them like roulette tables."

_Or like violin strings_ , John thinks. That had been an interesting detail. The case file had even included some of Sherlock Holmes's original compositions, scribbled in a spiky hand, sometimes on what had clearly been the closest scraps of paper — newspaper margins, the backs of case notes, though never, John had noted, pages from books — and sometimes on heavy, rich staff paper. He remembers the texture under his fingers. Really, it had been a surprisingly— _comprehensive_ file.

John clears his throat. "Yes, he had apparently been picking his diagnoses since he was a kid. I did read the case file."

"Ah, yes, right. Quite." Chilton's eyes dart towards him as they approach the security gate. "Doctor Watson—" Chilton licks his lips, a dry flick like a lizard, "— while I know your training hasn't been in the psychological sciences, a medical man such as yourself must understand the importance of accuracy in these matters. If you should learn anything of interest about him, I am sure I could credit you generously in my research..?"

John halts well before they reach the security gate. The unfinished stonework of the corridor breathes cold, swallows the echoes of his footsteps, the click of his cane. John looks at Chilton and shows his teeth. It could be called a smile.

"No," John says, without heat.

Chilton's chin ticks back in surprise. "You seem to have studied his file quite thoroughly. But you don't sound very interested in helping us improve it."

"You don't make it seem very interesting."

Chilton blinks at him before tipping his head slightly back, hooding his eyes and looking as far down at John as possible. John resists the urge to roll his eyes. Chilton offers him the file. "Well, then I am sure what little we have on him will prove most useful."

"No. Thank you." John clasps his hands at the small of his back, barely parade rest. "I did indeed study it quite thoroughly." He glances down at the hand holding out the file folder, at the thick knuckles and curved nails. "I suggest you get a screening for lung cancer and heart conditions," he adds, though for this he closes his lips around his bared teeth, softens his mouth, tilts his head mildly.

Chilton's jaw clicks shut behind his pursed lips. He jerks back the proffered hand. John holds his gaze until Chilton turns stiffly to lead the way to the security gate.

"Do not pass him anything but soft paper," Chilton reminds John unnecessarily as he is chaperoned through the security procedure. "He has charcoal if he needs to write." John endures the patronizing repetition almost cheerfully. It's no skin off his nose, and it signals the swiftly approaching end of Chilton's presence. Let him get in his parting shots. The security guard throws him a small grin and a quirked eyebrow when Chilton isn't looking. John smiles back, briefly.

He leaves Chilton behind the security gate, and starts down the last corridor.

There is a chair perched in a spill of light at the end of the hall. It sits in front of Sherlock's cell, looking singular and uncomfortable. John supposes this is only appropriate: from all he's heard and read, Sherlock Holmes is a singular and uncomfortable man.

As John makes his way forward, the view through the glass front of the cell emerges slowly, crawling out from behind the stony corner of the wall and out into the hard light, hiding first behind reflection and refraction. He sees the metal sliding tray first, for passing meals and papers, the airholes lining the top of the glass. Then the angle grows sharp enough, and the he can see inside.

Sherlock Holmes is sprawled untidily across the narrow bed, feet propped against the wall with ankles crossed a foot or so above the bed. The messy hang of his hair over the edge of the thin mattress highlights an unhealthily pale face, upside-down features making him look even more alien than the the photographs had suggested. Long fingers steeple under his chin, and his eyes are closed. The casual inelegance is somehow off-putting. John can't tell if it's because a man with that much death on his hands shouldn't look so relaxed, or because those long lines look wrong tossed so casually about.

The slightly uneven triple-step of John's feet and cane lingers a moment after John himself stops, shushing into the walls, echoes sharp and slow to fade. He ignores the chair.

And as the last echoes of his steps fade, bare of the shuffle of fabric and scrape of the chair, Sherlock opens his eyes.

They're startling eyes. John thought he was prepared for them, but the razor glitter of intelligence doesn't translate into the flat spare dimensions of photographs: in the flesh, there is no comparison.

"There have been two murders," Sherlock Holmes says, "and you are either very brave or very foolish."

His voice is deep and measured; surprisingly deep for the long, narrow frame.

John stops his hands from moving on the case files again; doesn't attempt to cover the names with his thumb. The first part would be easy enough to deduce; the second— he gets the feeling that Sherlock Holmes wouldn't grant the privilege of an _opinion_ without...

John swallows the question. They regard each other incongruously across the barrier of the glass, Sherlock still upside down and John at a species of automatic attention, before Sherlock's eyes narrow and he turns himself right side up, perching on the edge of the bed like a great white heron.

"You're not carrying my file. Just theirs." Sherlock plainly regards this as more explanation than should even be required. It makes John wonder what he did to merit it. He gets a distinct impression of Sherlock testing the waters: voice measured, eyes narrowed in attention.

"I don't really see what good your file would do me at this point. I've read it, of course." _Of course_ , Sherlock mouths in silent echo; his expression makes rolling his eyes unnecessary. John raises his eyebrow. "Would be a bit rude if I kept looking at it while talking to you, wouldn't it? Makes a piss-poor shield, too." John flips the two files in his hands upright in front of his stomach in demonstration. "Doesn't cover much." He pauses there, lets the possible meanings hang in the air together, though part of what arrests him is the distinct impression that most people who had stood there had done just this thing, holding Sherlock Holmes's file before them like a talisman, or protection. He lowers his hands.

"Ye-es..." Sherlock says slowly. John is disturbingly uncertain whether Sherlock is acknowledging the spoken meanings or the unspoken thought. Sherlock's eyes dart over him, minutely, before settling on John's again. "Afghanistan or Iraq?"

John blinks.

He almost responds, reflexively, some echo of _name, rank, serial number_ before another instinct catches his breath, and he looks closer. Sherlock is watching him with too much intent, tense, the gaze heavy and— _hungry_. John suppresses a shiver, blinking again, more slowly.

"I'd be interested in how you got that much," he offers mildly instead. And he _is_ interested— it's honestly fascinating, and about as unnerving as everyone had warned him it would be. He doubts he's quite up to lying to Sherlock Holmes, yet. "That sort of thing is why I'm here, though I rather think you know that."

There is a considering pause before Sherlock responds."Your flattery is quite careful." It sounds oddly distant. To label this _wary_ would imply that Sherlock Holmes felt John could possibly be any kind of threat. But at least he's still responding. Though there's something off about it John can't quite put his finger on. It sounds— not quite like a mask. An imitation of something, maybe. Or someone.

"Well, thanks, I think," John responds, ducking his chin. He looks up at Sherlock from under his brows. "Could say the same thing about you, really. Careful."

"Hm." Sherlock stares at him a moment longer before abruptly unfolding himself again and flopping back onto the bed. The soft sound is incongruous in this stony place with its glass and its hard light, and John almost flinches— or winces, maybe. He's losing him. "Go away," Sherlock says, confirming the thought.

The folders are a heavy weight in John's hands, stamped with the names of the dead and the phantom echoes of rows of identical files stretching into the future, following the pattern, following in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes. "Details match up between the killings, details that were never released to the press," John says, too quickly. His hands flex across the creamy manila surfaces.

Sherlock glances at him dismissively. "There's only one person it can be. Mystery solved. Dull."

"Sherlock. Moriarty was never real."

The other man ignores this completely.

John grits his teeth, and thinks back over Sherlock's file. He doesn't regret leaving it behind, but— yes. Yes. He remembers.

"' _One shouldn't theorize in advance of the facts_ ,'" John quotes softly.

Sherlock freezes. His eyes snap open.

"' _Or one will begin to twist the facts to suit theories_ ,'" John continues doggedly, quietly, and he sees Sherlock's lips shaping the words soundlessly alongside him, "' _rather than theories to suit facts_.'"

Sherlock stares straight ahead.

And then his head snaps around, and "Get _out,_ " he snarls.

"No," John says. He watches Sherlock for a moment, then takes a calculated step forward, closer to the glass. Sherlock's nostrils flare.

Well. John always did have a weakness for gambling. He takes a breath.

"Afghanistan," he offers.

Sherlock sits up minutely.

_Ha_ , John thinks.

"Answer me about the cases," John prompts. _I'll answer you about myself_. He doesn't say it. He doesn't need to.

Sherlock's eyes sharpen like blades, like the slice of sunlight across sand. He surges up, off the bed, prowls closer to the glass, and the weight of his full attention breaks across John like a wave. He inhales, almost loud enough to hiss, and Sherlock smiles.

"You will tell me the truth." Sherlock's voice is low, quick. Compelling. John resists the urge to swallow.

"Only if you do too," he responds evenly, and Sherlock's grin is mad and maddening.

The silence hangs between them as solid as the sheet of glass, and does as little to cut the intensity of Sherlock's stare.

"Murders," Sherlock says, slow, shaping the word. "Serial murders." There is undeniable relish in this declaration. John elects not to respond to this. John elects to ignore the shiver crawling down his spine. John elects to not think too hard about the choices he's making here.

"Tell me about the bodies," Sherlock demands.

John sucks in a breath, and holds it a moment in his throat. He does not sigh it out in a sag of relief. If it serves equally well to plug up an irritated retort, then that may be for the best.

Instead, he flips open the first file, flicking through the loose pages — all staples and clips picked out — until he reaches the post-mortem, left hand trailing along the black letters, the texture catching on his fingertips. "Samuel Bennet, male, aged 33, drowned at a swimming pool on July—"

"No, no," Sherlock waves this away. "What did you _see_?"

John looks up from the file. Sherlock is staring at the wall over his steepled fingers. John lets the silence stretch between them until Sherlock looks at him again, brow creased with impatience.

"I didn't see the first body until after the second murder," he says carefully.

Sherlock narrows his eyes. John holds his gaze, closes the files, slowly, and Sherlock says, low and intent, "Yes."

John swallows.

He hesitates, eyeing Sherlock for a moment, considering. "Male, found dead in swimming pool. Estimated mid-to-late 30s." Poor lifestyle, revealed in the ensuing investigation, had aged Bennet beyond the calendar years shown on his ID, but John sticks to what he had observed directly, and is rewarded by a minute flicker in Sherlock's eyes. Right.

"Stiffness of limbs observed at scene, similar to rigor mortis indicating at least three hours after time of death." Sherlock's fingers move under his chin, tapping at each other in some indecipherable sequence. John keeps talking. "However, liver temperature taken at the scene was 36 degrees. With ambient temperature of the pool water at 25.5 degrees, this suggest a time of death closer to half an hour." Sherlock paces closer to the glass. John stays where he is. "Roughly 70 milliliters of liquid in each lung, matching that in the pool..." John slows, watching Sherlock pace in front of the glass. Sherlock waves an impatient hand at him. "Toxicology — suspiciously little water for drowning, disparate indications of time of death —" he interrupts himself inelegantly; Sherlock's prowling is distracting, throwing out sharp shadows, long lines. This earns him an actual glare. John feels his stance widen in challenge, and he rallies. "Toxicology revealed _Clostridium botulinim_. This explained the paralysis and—"

Sherlock exhales, a sharp interruption. "Method of introduction."

"—Was a series of linear scrapes across his fingertips." John comes very close to snapping that one; it rides hard on the heels of Sherlock's query.

Sherlock pauses, looks up, though not at John.

"Interesting."

He stands there for a moment more before his eyes flicker to the folders in John's hands. Then he starts pacing again, and John tries not to grit his teeth.

"The other one," Sherlock orders, not stopping, fingers twitching against each other beneath his chin.

John's thumb strokes across the second name involuntarily; his other hand flexes on his cane. He takes a breath. "Male, late fifties, overweight. Initially ruled a heart attack— no obvious signs of external trauma, including marks or damage on hyoid." Here, he stops. Breathes, uncertain. Watches Sherlock's pacing, the unearthly rhythm of it. "I was called in for this one. Coincidence. Pure coincidence." It was. It was. Sherlock waves him on: _Boring._ "But I saw—" John's teeth clench, and he retreats then to a more familiar language, something he speaks easily, "I saw petechial hemorrhages. Facial, concentrated around the eyes—"

Sherlock's eyes have fallen closed and he seems to be drinking in the words, lips parted, forehead almost touching the glass. He has stopped moving.

John falters to a halt.

"I'm— I'm sorry. Are you _enjoying_ this?"

Sherlock's eyes open, lividly crystalline. "Oh, _yes_ ," he breathes.

The exhalation leaves a fleeting fug on the glass. It's a wet reminder of humanity, of heat. John feels stained.

"You know what, no. I can just pass you the files. My notes are in there."

"Oh no, Doctor," and John flinches.

And then he feels very cold. _Doctor_.

"This isn't about the files at all." Anger creeps across his skin. It mixes nauseatingly with the cold. "You were trying to learn about _me_."

"I wouldn't say I was 'trying'," Sherlock counters, and there is something heady in his cool smile, almost like pride. Or possessiveness. "Doctor," he repeats, goading.

John's breath is coming fast.

"I never lied," Sherlock points out primly.

And John almost laughs. It's too absurd. He feels the hollow plunge in his stomach of a bad hand of cards. Or a good hand beat by a better player. It's— It's—

"That is—" He cuts himself off. _Oh, hell_. "That is cheating," he bites out.

And something shatters then, cresting across his skin like a fever, because Sherlock laughs, a sharp bark that bursts against the glass, followed by, of all things, a descending spiral note of giggles, and this is so goddamn unnerving that an echo of it stutters out of John, too, at first out of sheer frayed tension, and then— and then because he's a bloody idiot to have fallen back on gambling when it came to Sherlock Holmes. His jagged chuckles chase Sherlock's down the corridor, and he is obscenely grateful for the thick security door.

_He has killed a lot of people_.

The thought is not as sobering as it should be. Not when what whispers up his spine in response is: _Well, so have I_.

The two together curdle the laughter in his mouth, and he stops, swallows before it all turns to bile.

"You can't do that," he says instead, simply, steadily. It comes out almost gentle, and his mouth is dry because he is not at all scaring the piss out of himself.

Sherlock is, abruptly, right there in front of him across the glass. "Can't I?" he breathes.

There is a very long moment that feels like groping in silent panic for the brake pedal, or like watching a bullet oil through the air, an infinite series of adrenalin-sharp snapshots before impact.

When Sherlock inhales, John wants to close his eyes. He doesn't.

"Your haircut, your bearing say military. Your face and hands are tan, but no tan above the wrists — you've been abroad but not sunbathing. You walk with a limp and a cane, but don't take a chair when you stand, so it's at least partly psychosomatic. That suggests the original circumstances of the injury were traumatic — wounded in action, then. Wounded in action, suntan: Afghanistan or Iraq."

He is, strangely, floating.

_This is it_ , John thinks distantly. What he came for, that sharp observant mind. What he was warned against: being peeled apart in layers, the vivisection.

Sherlock's voice is low, quick, steady, eager.

It's like a river. The words rustle around him, low like water and quick like birds. He remembers a word, suddenly: murmuration. It is a murmuration. A murmuration of truths. A murmuration of starlings. A murder of crows. He remembers Sherlock shaping that word with his mouth. _Murder_.

His hands are very steady.

"You have a therapist," Sherlock says. "Psychosomatic limp. Of course you have a therapist. They think you have post-traumatic stress disorder."

Sherlock pauses, mouth sharp twist of distaste. Then his hands come up to meet at his philtrum.

"But you are not like that, Doctor—" he tilts his head, cool eyes coming all at once to an intense focus on him, and John resists the urge to swallow. "Are you?"

John meets his gaze steadily, and the moments drip by, sticky and solid.

"No," Sherlock murmurs, "No, you are not like those pale broken things jumping at the mundane assault of quotidian noises, hiding in their own shadows with their pain like pitiful blankets. You _miss_ it." He hisses that, the sibilant a slow island, stretched out amid the quick stream of his words. A smile curls at the edges of his lips, the rest of his mouth a mystery behind his fingers, but John knows, somehow, that his lips were parted. "You know that rush in your veins, don't you, Doctor? It _keens_ , and in its absence your bones are brittle and your mind hungers for that chemical poetry, the kiss of adrenaline. Your mind is sharper then, isn't it?"

And Sherlock lunges, slams his hands against the glass, the snap of his teeth white and loud. John flinches back, then absorbs that automatic reaction of his body without shame — harder to ignore is the sudden brightness of details, the singing of his blood, the way Sherlock's skin is sharp and white and the way he can suddenly trace the whorls of his fingerprints, almost count the man's pores.

"Isn't it?" Sherlock echoes himself, grinning into John's face.

John schools his face out of an obscene answering grin.

"Yes, yes..." Sherlock's glance shivers across him, catalouging details in fractions of seconds. "Elevated heartrate, pupils dilated." He closes his eyes and sniffs, elegantly obscene, before meeting John's eyes again. "Perspiration — and drugstore deodorant, how droll. Yet your hands are steady." His eyes flick downwards, then back up. "Also symptoms of... desire."

"But you miss being _of use_ , too." Sherlock slumps back onto the bed, and looks away, disdain etched into the way he rests his temple against two fingertips. He rolls his eyes. "Dull. You were almost interesting."

"I'll take it as a compliment," John says dryly.

Sherlock glances at him again with a faint sneer of contempt. "Yes, you were almost deemed worthy by _the great Sherlock Holmes_." His voice adopts a sing-song mockery, and John wonders for an instant how much of that is directed inwards.

"Funnily enough, being held high in your regard doesn't really interested me. The compliment I referred to was the part about being found 'dull.'"

Sherlock's eyes snap into a narrow glare.

"That. Was. A. _LIE_!" The last word snaps out like a whip, and Sherlock follows it through the space between them, a flurry of long lines and urgency until he is nearly pressed against the glass, scant inches away, his looming height somehow enveloping the both of them in something entirely too much like intimacy. John breathes. And Sherlock whispers. "I thought we agreed not to lie to each other, Doctor."

"I'll stop lying if you will," John challenges, voice low and inexplicably raw. He fights the urge to moisten his lips, slick his throat with a swallow.

Sherlock's eyes narrow, his gaze seeming to occupy the entirety of the space between them. His grin unfurls, quick and gone, like the snap of an insect wing framing a brief glitter of teeth.

John tells himself that he's not forgetting to breathe.

John tells himself that he does not feel sick, does not feel angry, is not at all fucking terrified.

"Linear," Sherlock says.

The solid air between them cracks like bone splintering, and John almost checks the glass for fractures. Everything melts out of him all at once, and suddenly he very much needs his cane. It is only Sherlock, watching him as if idly across the barrier.

"I'm sorry— what?"

Sherlock huffs. "Linear," he repeats. "You said 'linear scrapes'. A very particular choice of words."

John makes a dizzy attempt to orient himself in the conversation. _Linear scrapes_. A series of linear scrapes. Samuel Bennet.

Sherlock apparently reads the comprehension in his face, because he is pointing imperiously towards the sliding tray at the edge of the cell. "Show me."

John grips the files. Licks his lips.

Then he eases the first one open and slides out a photograph, and holds it up close to the glass instead.

Sherlock is meeting his eyes, not looking at it yet. Good.

His hands are steady. His voice is steady. "Tell me when you'll have something for me."

Sherlock quirks a brow, and John feels sick as he tries not to read appreciation into that.

And Sherlock's glance drops down to the photo, and John fights not to exhale, sag, float. He watches Sherlock's face, because John knows what the photograph shows. Bennet's thumbs, with four rough scratches across the pad of each: **|\/|**

Sherlock's face goes still. John tries not to think about how closely he already had to know that face to notice. _Yes_ , he thinks instead. _Yes_.

"Tell me," John prompts.

Sherlock blinks, slow. When his eyes open again they are bright like a fever, wet and hot. They wander between the photograph and John's face, slow enough to pass for normal on anyone else. On Sherlock Holmes— _This man was an addict_. At one end of that ocular pendulum swing, John is trying not to shiver, because the options for _substance in question_ here should not be bloody plural.

It takes John a moment to realize that Sherlock's gaze has settled on him. In light of John's most recent train of thought, this is not comforting. His eyes look clearer, at least.

"Tomorrow," Sherlock says.

John frowns and takes the photograph away. Sherlock's face remains impassive, but his eyes track the photo back to the case file, and John thinks of Harry trying to stretch out the last bottle.

"Sherlock," John says. _You don't get to stretch this out. People are dying._

"Tomorrow," Sherlock repeats, and good sodding Christ, John is suddenly very glad of the glass between them because if that is a bloody pout then John wants to punch it off the mad bastard's face. Enough. Christ. _Enough_.

"Fine," he says. "Fine. It's all fine. It's always all _fine_." He jams the files into the sliding tray and shoves it through with a horrific screech of metal. Sherlock doesn't move.

"Tomorrow," John echoes. "Amazing," he spits out. "Unbelievable."

Sherlock's lips twitch. "Doctor—"

"John." His teeth snap together with an unnatural click over the soft end of his own name. "It's John. John Watson."

"John," Sherlock repeats in his low, cultured voice. "You're about to be very tedious. Unless you can explain to me why you thought I would have any of the normal concerns for other people's welfare."

"Yes, I bloody well wonder why, too," John snaps. He draws in a breath, draws himself up. "Tomorrow," he says, more evenly, and tells himself it's a reminder for Sherlock, and not the promise of an answer.

He limps away, and does not look at Sherlock's face, and waits until he's past the security gates before leaning against the stone. It is cool and faintly musty under his forearm as he breathes.

That... that had not gone well at all.

  
  
  


_________________

  
  
  
  


"You got him to take the files though, right?" Lestrade asks.

"Yes," John grinds out. Yes. That should really be helping a lot more than it actually is.

"Damn sight more than anyone else's ever managed, you know."

"I know." John shifts the phone to his other ear, wipes at his face. His eyes feel gritty. "I know."

"Hey." Lestrade's voice softens. "You alright?"

John almost flinches away from the question. "Christ, Greg, I don't know."

"Did he read you? He read you, didn't he." Lestrade's voice sounds suddenly deflated, tired, pressed flat like an old photograph left too many times under bright light. It sounds so— Christ, _normal_ , a normal reaction. A normal reason. John chases it, trying not to feel desperate.

"Yeah. Yes. Of course. It's what he does. I suppose I should be flattered," John huffs, and then that threatens to turn into a laugh and he tamps down on it firmly before the jagged thing can crawl down the phone line.

Lestrade snorts. "Oh sure, flattered."

John registers vaguely that this was still maybe not a normal thing to say, even if Lestrade's reaction let it pass. His teeth press together with the urge to explain. "Chilton made notes in his file. He hadn't been bothering to share his conclusions with visitors for years."

"Yeah," Lestrade says over the line, low and quiet. "Sounds like him."

John's mind ticks over how Lestrade's tired voice had sounded like overexposure, hears the quiet uneasy familiarity of reminiscence. Remembers the way Sherlock had poured out words like he was starving.

The near-subliminal hiss of the empty connection hovers in his ear, and John thinks about telling Lestrade that being read by Sherlock Holmes had not been the disturbing part.

The thought hovers there in the static for an endless moment before John's brain veers violently away from that direction, and settles on a different itch. It's only mildly less unnerving, but at least here he might have room to get angry. "Hey, Greg... why was I at the second crime scene, really?"

He hears a long, low sigh swallow the hiss in the line. When Lestrade answers, his voice has shifted, cadences more even, closeness slipping away into near-formality. "Look, I don't know what to tell you. They yanked out my usual team, it happens often enough these days. Ever since— well, you know. We don't ask questions anymore." John is silent. "I'm sorry, John. I honestly don't know."

"Right," John says, and rubs his forehead. "Right."

Irritation and unease chafe against each other, make his skin feel tight, but there's nothing Lestrade can do about the mess Sherlock Holmes left behind at the Yard. John believes him when he says he doesn't know. It doesn't matter. They're all here to do a job. _Let it go, Watson_.

He breathes that, for a moment.

_Bullshit_.

But it's not something Lestrade's in any position to help him with, apparently. If he had anything more than an itch at the back of his brain over this— Christ, he hates being used. The difference between _useful_ and _used_ is so bloody obvious only a bureaucrat could miss it.

"Okay," John says finally, realizing only then that Lestrade had given him the space to breathe, silent but present, patient on the other end of the line.

"Okay," Lestrade echoes. John thinks about how it's still _DI_ Lestrade even after the cataclysm that was the day Irene Adler caught Sherlock Holmes. He thinks about Lestrade in the bright flash of press conferences, and Lestrade's unfamiliar figure just behind the police tape when John had paused outside the scene, looking for the space that forms around the ranking officer. It's a front line, of sorts.

He thinks about how Greg asked him if he was all right.

John blows out his breath.

"Listen, Sherlock demanded I come back tomorrow. I know it's—"

"Christ then man, get some rest," Lestrade cuts in. "You'll bloody well need it." And John laughs, a little helplessly. He likes Greg, he does. Bugger the politics.

"Thanks," he says, mouth finally relaxing into a real smile without the grit of teeth behind it.

"You too, mate."

After they hang up, it's just him in the hotel room, Sherlock Holmes's file a fat heap on the desk in front of him.

John puts his head in his hands.

He ponders having a panic attack. It would be really helpful to have a panic attack right now. It would feel awful, because he _should_ feel awful, anyone in their right mind should feel incredibly sodding awful after a meeting with Sherlock Holmes. It would be downright bloody reassuring to have a panic attack.

He considers symptoms of withdrawal, the dangerously giddy light-headedness, like he's short of breath. It's ridiculous.

His shoulders shake. The silent, helpless laughter rocks him against the hotel desk for a minute, his mouth stuck in a rictus grin, eyes squeezed shut.

It peters out aimlessly, without satisfaction or real conclusion, and John Watson sits alone in the hotel room, staring at the file in front of him. Chilton has added notes to it, evaluations, interviews — if catalogues of the subject's unflickering expression as he sits in silence and refuses to answer questions can be called that — but the vast majority of the stuff — and John can think of no better word for this insane jumble of errata — is clearly from before Sherlock Holmes was put away. The standard host of family history, physical description, criminal record — though in the case of Sherlock Holmes there is absolutely nothing standard about that last one — is there, but buried in tucked-away corners between letters, email transcripts, lists of books, catalogues of possessions, notes, pages and pages of scribbled music. Music, for God's sake. It's a madhouse of a file, uncomfortably intimate in ways John doesn't want to think about right now, not with the memory of Sherlock's stare and the sharp white flicker of his grin and the sharp black surge of adrenalin in his blood still pressed into the back of John's skull.

It's a puzzle piece, maybe. He only has two, and he's not even sure they're from the same picture. A file with things that shouldn't be there. And himself, at a crime scene he shouldn't have been at. Both led here, to John in the hotel room with Sherlock Holmes's life spread out in front of him and no idea why he was put here.

John is, not very abruptly, exhausted.

He leaves the file untouched on the desk. When he wakes in the morning, he feels colourless and drained, and as he watches himself brush his teeth in the mirror, he thinks maybe it is all to the good: if he's too tired to feel anything today maybe he's too tired to let Sherlock Holmes under his skin again. He thinks of hypodermics, and spits.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos appreciated! They'll likely make me work faster!


End file.
